Signs of the Times

Edward Falkowski

Christian Herald

Edward Falkowski
in the Christian Herald New York, New York

Work that fails to sustain the sense of a workman's dignity depletes his spirit and soon ignites a smolder of resentment that not only reduces the quality level of the work performed but sets off a chain reaction of grievances that might easily enough have been avoided. Deprived of positive nutriment the spirit soon discovers it can feed upon the less wholesome aspects of its plight....

What is dignity on the job?... It is nothing less than the total spiritual philosophy of work.

The industrial revolution with its rigid mechanical concepts of the physical world sought to divide a man into a functional part that was needed at some point in the production process and a part that would be left outside the shop dormant until quitting time or Sunday came around. The rejected part commonly included his spiritual and intellectual capacities too seldom called upon in factory-work.... This basic concept continues to the present....

In bygone days a craftsman took enormous pride in his ability to make a hand-carved chair or table. But machines have supplanted these manual skills and the average factory worker finds himself most of the time tending a machine that does the actual work. ...He spends his working lifetime repeating a series of time-studied and carefully patterned movements....Often he is horrified in the end by the seeming futility of his investment of the self....

No man relishes the prospect of spending the rest of his life closed up in some small and trivial-seeming task that bears no apparent relationship to the other work being done throughout the factory. Where is dignity if the work has no meaning? And where is meaning if there is no creative involvement in the over-all task?

This is the task confronting the unions and managers of tomorrow: transforming soul-dulling work into creative involvement, making work an arena where the self can find fulfillment, the spirit attain a sense of divine significance underlying human effort....

The structure of human dignity rests on sound Christian faith.... We learn that doing can be identical with loving, and responsibility with mutual confidence and trust.

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December 2, 1961

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